Operating Systems

IBM Research continues to make critical contributions in operating systems:

• Dynamic Logical Partitioning enables a large shared memory based system to deploy multiple operating systems and dynamically provision the resources based on the individual needs.
• In-Kernel web caching allows the serving of web content at the OS level rather than at the application level.
• Scalability is explored in supporting large shared memory platforms such as IBM's Regatta and next generation machines, and large distributed platforms, such as BlueGene.
• Embedded Systems, such as hand held devices, are becoming commonplace. The Linux Watch project is investigating issues in this space.
• Grid Computing enables better utilization of multiple independent computing domains and constitutes new problems in resource management.
• Autonomic Systems Software allows systems that are becoming increasingly complex and challenging to administer to be self-reliant, increasing availability and reducing total cost of ownership
• Customizability allows the OS to optimally support the increasing varying demands of applications. This has been explored in the K42 operating system project.
• Security is becoming more important as services are accessed through the internet.
• Hypervisors allow heterogeneous operating systems to co-exist on a single platform.
• Open Source has been a great movement and IBM research actively participates in many projects. We also continue to examine our current portfolio for open source applicability.
• zFS is a research project aimed at building a decentralized file system that distributes all aspects of file and storage management over a set of cooperating machines interconnected by a high-speed network.

IBM researchers have been, and continue to be, among the worldwide leaders in operating systems. Being part of IBM gives us rare opportunities to have our research affect both the state-of-the-art and the state-of-the-practice. We advance the state-of-the-art by publishing in leading journals and conferences, engaging in active participation in standards bodies, producing numerous patents, and collaborating with researchers from top-ranked academic institutions and transfer our technologies into IBM products and open source. We affect the state of the practice through significant engagements, both with business units that make up IBM, and also with key IBM customers.

An Infrastructure for Multiprocessor Run-Time Adaptation, Jonathan Appavoo, Kevin Hui, Michael Stumm, Robert Wisniewski, Dilma da Silva, Orran Krieger, Craig Soules WOSS 2002.

Autonomic Computing and Grid, Pratap Pattnaik, Kattamuri Ekanadham, Joefon Jann Book chapter in "GRID2002" ed. by G.Fox/Ian Foster and published by John Wiley.

Energy trade-offs in the IBM Wristwatch Computer, N. Kamijoh, T. Inoue, C. M. Olsen, M. T. Raghunath, C. Narayanaswami, 2001 International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC'01)

High-Performance Memory-Based Web Servers: Kernel and User-Space Performance, Philippe Joubert, Robert King, Richard Neves, Mark Russinovich and John Tracey, 2001 USENIX Annual Technical Conference

Improving Linux Block I/O for Enterprise Workloads, Shailabh Nagar, Hubertus Franke (IBM T.J.Watson Research Center) Peter W.Y. Wong, Badari Pulavarty, Janet Morgan, Jonathan Lahr, Bill Hartner, Suparna Bhattacharya (IBM Linux Technology Center) Ottawa Linux Symposium 2002.

Using CQUAL for Static Analysis of Authorization Hook Placement, Xiaolan Zhang, Antony Edwards, Trent Jaeger. USENIX 2002 Security Symposium.

Recent Accomplishments
Marc Auslander, IBM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow & National Academy of Engineering

Orran Krieger, Adjunct Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University

Noah Mendelsohn, Editor SOAP/XML, WWW Consortium 2002.

Noah Mendelsohn, Program Committe, OSDI 02

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